Thursday, January 1, 2015

Our forthcoming guest speakers at Spoken INK

FEBRUARY 17 : Mystery writer DEBRA PURDY KONG

Debra
has a diploma in criminology and has worked in security as a patrol and
communications officer. She is the author of Alex Bellamy mysteries:
Taxed to Death (1995) and Fatal Encryption (2008). The Opposite of Dark,
(available from Touchwood Editions March 2011) is the first in a series
featuring transit security officer, Casey Holland. Debra’s 4th Casey
Holland mystery, THE DEEP END, is now available through bookstores, Amazon, and Kobo. Debra has also published over one hundred short stories, essays, and articles in publications that include Chicken Soup for the Bride’s Soul, Dandelion, NeWest Review, The Vancouver Sun, and several anthologies.

PAM GALLOWAY’S upcoming book, Passing Stranger is a memoir in poetry covering the years of her long marriage, the desire for children, issues of fertility and infertility, pregnancy and loss, motherhood ultimately achieved and eventually a divorce. Its themes will speak to all women who have experienced the joys and the tribulations of married life and motherhood in all their complexities. The interweaving of its story of divorce after many years of marriage reflects a new reality for many women of middle and past middle-age. Pam’s first book of poetry, Parallel Lines, was published in 2006. She collaborated with four other poets on the book Quintet: Themes and Variations (Ekstasis Editions, 1998). Her poems have also been published widely in literary magazines and anthologies and twice on the website of the Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate. Pam lives in Vancouver. She recently participated in the successful Han Shan Poetry Project (initiated by her Inanna partner, author Susan McCaslin) to save an endangered rainforest in Langley, BC.
Photo: Patrick Jandak

SUSAN MCCASLIN’S upcoming spiritual autobiography, Into the Mystic: My Years with Olga (Inanna Press, Oct. 2014) is a mixed-genre work of creative non-fiction and poetry that explores the poet’s apprenticeship with an elderly mystic who lived in Port Moody, B.C. Olga Park shared with Susan her profound interior experiences and contemplative practices during sixteen of the author’s most formative years (age 21-37). The book centres on the relationship of seeker to teacher and its continuing legacy. Susan is nourished by wilderness and by the world’s global mystics and contemplatives of various spiritual traditions.

Susan is also the author of eleven volumes of poetry, including The Disarmed Heart (The St. Thomas Poetry Series, Toronto, (May 2014), poems on the roots of violence and of peace-making. Her previous volume, Demeter Goes Skydiving (2012) was short-listed for the BC Book Prize (Dorothy Livesay Award) and the first-place winner of the Alberta Book Publishing Award (Robert Kroetsch Poetry Book Award) in 2012.

Living in Fort Langley, British Columbia with her husband, she recently initiated the Han Shan Poetry Project as part of a successful campaign to protect an endangered rainforest along the Fraser River in British Columbia.